Thursday, October 21, 2004

Eskimos Crushing Loss

While perusing media reports after the Edmonton Eskimos blew a big stinky one in Regina on Saturday, I noticed the repetitive use of the following words: crushed, manhandled, awful, implosion, eruption, weird, ugly, and thumped. The words I used were in the same vein but had somewhat more color and vigour.

Some of you wrote to point out that I wrote a parody of the Calgary Stampeders on a Weekend when the Stampeders had their best game ever and the Edmonton Eskimos blew the aformentioned wet fart.

At press time it was the Stampeders who were heavily favoured to be the ones eating crap while the Eskimos had more than favourable odds to beat Regina. Regrettably, we went with our gut instead of waiting for the results.

These things happen much to the chagrin of important media people like me. Imagine you're the publisher of the Chigaco Daily Tribune in 1948 and you wake up to find out that Thomas Dewey did not beat Harry Truman after all. That has got to hurt.

Well I've met with all our researchers, interns and divisional editors - across all our divisions - and I've expressed my disappointment that we got this one so wrong. We all agreed that we have to do better for you the reader in the future. Otherwise we run the risk of you not believing anything we say and we can't have that because we perform a critical service to the community.

You Calgary Stampeder fans can take comfort in knowing that in the last Stampeders game of the season there is a very real possibility that the outcome could decide whether the Edmonton Eskimos miss the playoffs for the first time in about 30 years.